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Beauty

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The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful? ~ André Gide
Beautiful as they may be while I am alive, so ghastly they will be to look upon in the grave! ~ Joseph
That beautiful flower in that vase has not spoken a word tonight; it will never speak a word, but, nevertheless, through its beauty and magnificent silence it is lifting up, and making more Christlike every human being in this room. ~ Booker T. Washington
Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul. ~ Augustine
Beauty, real beauty, is something very grave. ~ Jean Anouilh
She had gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was beautiful. ~ Charles Dickens
Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God. ~ Jean Anouilh
Everything changes, but beauty remains. ~ Kelly Clarkson
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover. ~ Joseph Addison

Beauty is a characteristic of a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology and culture. The subjective experience of beauty often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being.

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A

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If a person's actions are not good, it does not matter how the person looks physically. Doing good is equivalent to being beautiful. ~ Molefi Kete Asante
  • Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover,
    Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
  • What is lovely never dies,
    But passes into other loveliness,
    Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or wingëd air.
    • Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "A Shadow of the Night", Unguarded Gates and Other Poems (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895), p. 26.
  • Things are beautiful if you love them.
    • Jean Anouilh, Mademoiselle Colombe (1950), Act 2, scene 2, trans. Louis Kronenberger.
  • Beauty, real beauty, is something very grave. If there is a God, He must be partly that.
    • Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal (1950), Act 2, trans. Lucienne Hill.
  • Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
  • Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend.
    • Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1265–1274), Part I, Question 27, Article 1, Reply to Objection 3; tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920, New York: Benziger Bros).
  • A common expression among African Americans relates the good to the beautiful, "beauty is as beauty does" or "she's beautiful because she's good." The first statement places emphasis on what a person does, that is, how a person "walks" among others in the society. The second statement identifies the beautiful by action. If a person's actions are not good, it does not matter how the person looks physically. Doing good is equivalent to being beautiful.
  • Slow was I, Lord, too slow in loving you. ... You were waiting within me while I went outside me, looking for you there, misshaping myself as I flung myself upon the shapely things you made.
  • Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul.
    • Augustine of Hippo, Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Ninth Homily, §9, H. Browne and J. H. Meyers, trans. (1995).

B

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  • There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
  • The beautiful are never desolate;
    But some one always loves them—God or man.
    If man abandons, God himself takes them.
  • Are not all young men ready to trust the promise of a pretty face and to infer beauty of soul from beauty of feature? An indefinable impulse leads them to believe that moral perfection must co-exist with physical perfection.
  • Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite.
    • George Bancroft, "The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race" (oration delivered before the New York Historical Society, November 26, 1854), Literary and Historical Miscellanies (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), p. 489
  • Unfortunately, truth is neither a listable nor a decidable property; nor is the truth of a statement of arithmetic. The American logician John Myhill has used the term 'prospective' to characterize those attributes of the world that are neither listable nor decidable. They are properties that cannot be recognized by the application of some formula, made to conform to a rule, or generated by some computer program. They are characterized by incessant novelty that cannot be encompassed by any finite set of rules. 'Beauty', 'ugliness', 'truth', 'harmony', simplicity', and 'poetry' are names we give to some of the attributes of this sort. There is no way of listing all examples of beauty or ugliness, nor any procedure for saying whether or not something possesses either of those attributes, without redefining them in some more restrictive fashion that kills their prospective character.
  • Too often, though, the beauty that is thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful, superficial and blinding, leaving the onlooker dazed; instead of bringing him out of himself and opening him up to horizons of true freedom as it draws him aloft, it imprisons him within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy. It is a seductive but hypocritical beauty that rekindles desire, the will to power, to possess, and to dominate others, it is a beauty which soon turns into its opposite, taking on the guise of indecency, transgression or gratuitous provocation. Authentic beauty, however, unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond.
  • Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
    • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).
  • Glance at the sun.
    See the moon and the stars.
    Gaze at the beauty of the earth's greenings.
    Now,
    Think.
    • Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), tr. Gabriele Uhlein, Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen (1983), p. 45.
  • Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God
    and Angel of his Presence thru' all creation,
    fashioning her love-realm in the mind of man,
    attempteth every mortal child with influences
    of her divine supremacy.
  • Verily by Beauty it is that we come at WISDOM,
    yet not by Reason at Beauty.
  • I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic.
  • The beautiful seems right
    By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
    Because of weakness.
  • Beauty, thou art twice blessed! thou blessest the gazer and the possessor; often at once the effect and the cause of goodness! A sweet disposition—a lovely soul—an affectionate nature—will speak in the eyes—the lips—the brows—and become the cause of beauty. On the other hand, they who have a gift that commands love, a key that opens all hearts, are ordinarily inclined to look with happy eyes upon the world—to be cheerful and serene—to hope and to confide. There is more wisdom than the vulgar dream of in our admiration of a fair face.
  • Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface continual and yet hardly perceptible at any point which forms one of the great constituents of beauty?
    • Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Part III, Section XV.
  • Beauty's of a fading nature—
    Has a season and is gone!
  • Nothing gives life a finer touch of grace, than the presence in the family circle of a lovely girl of seventeen.
  • A lovely girl is above all rank. Men, however high, must feel her higher, however low.
  • Her glossy hair was cluster'd o'er a brow
    Bright with intelligence, and fair and smooth;
    Her eyebrow's shape was like the aerial bow,
    Her cheek all purple with the beam of youth,
    Mounting, at times, to a transparent glow,
    As if her veins ran lightning.
  • A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded,
    A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.

C

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  • Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
  • Beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything.
  • There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
    • Rachel Carson Speech (1954) In Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998)
  • I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth.
    • Rachel Carson Speech (1954) In Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998)
  • Is it the right of this, our generation, in its selfish materialism, to destroy these things because we are blinded by the dollar sign? Beauty-and all the values the derive from beauty-are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar.
    • Rachel Carson Speech (1954) In Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998)
  • The reason for the unreason with which you treat reason, so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.
  • No todas hermosuras enamoran, que algunas alegran la vista, y no rinden la voluntad.
    • All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.
    • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605–1615), Book II, Chapter 6.
  • Beauty has this power, that in an instant, a moment, it brings with it the desire of whoever sees and knows it, and when it reveals or promises some way of reaching and enjoying it, with powerful fervor it sets fire to the soul of whoever contemplates it, just like the means whereby dry prepared gunpowder is easily lit by any spark that touches it.
  • It is a prerogative of beauty to always be respected.
    • Miguel de Cervantes, "The Colloquy of the Dogs", in Exemplary Novels (1613), trans. Edith Grossman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 371.
  • There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.
  • Her gentle limbs did she undress,
    And lay down in her loveliness.
  • There is in true beauty, as in courage, somewhat which narrow souls cannot dare to admire.
  • I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may-light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
    • John Constable Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)
  • I think that the most important thing a woman can have - next to talent, of course - is her hairdresser.
  • The giant female bodybuilder proves unthinking people wrong who believe feminine beauty can never be harmonious with well developed musculature.

D

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  • “You are not traditionally beautiful; and you know it. We women do. But what most people mean by beauty is really a kind of aesthetic acceptability, not so much character as a lack of it, a set of features and lineaments that hide their history, that suggest history itself does not exist. But the template by which we recognize the features and forms in the human body that cause the heart to halt, threatening to spill us over into the silence of death—that is drawn on another part of the soul entirely...But all sing, chant, hymn the history of the body, if only because we all know how people regard bodies that deviate from the lauded and totally abnormal norm named beauty. Most of us would rather not recognize such desires in ourselves and thus avoid all contemplation of what the possession of such features means about the lives, the bodies, the histories of others, preferring instead to go on merely accepting the acceptable. But that is not who I am.”
  • Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.
    • Democritus (ca. 4th century BCE). Tr. Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1948)
  • She had gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was beautiful.
  • God help you if you are an ugly girl because too pretty is also your doom: everyone harbours a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.
  • Beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.
    • Cory Doctorow, Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts (2014), reprinted in Rich Horton (ed.), The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (p. 332)
  • Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,
    The power of beauty I remember yet,
    Which once inflam'd my soul, and still inspires my wit.
  • When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind!
  • I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.
  • The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised.
  • Heaven forbid if beauty were to have substance. Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue.

E

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  • The desire for truth so prominent in the quest of science, a reaching out of the spirit from its isolation to something beyond, a response to beauty in nature and art, an Inner Light of conviction and guidance—are these as much a part of our being as our sensitivity to sense impressions?
  • Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.
    • Albert Einstein, in "My Credo", a speech to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin (Autumn 1932), as published in Einstein: A Life in Science (1994) by Michael White and John Gribbin, p. 262.
  • Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry for 16 May 1834; Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820–1872, Vol. III (1910), p. 298.
  • Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
  • If eyes were made for seeing,
    Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.
  • We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.
  • Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

F

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  • I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.
  • The most economical way of obtaining good results is to apply the great, fundamental principles of art; and depend on them for beauty, rather than upon the use of either applied ornament or more expensive materials.
    • Ernest Flagg, Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)
  • There's nothing that allays an angry mind
    So soon as a sweet beauty.
    • John Fletcher, The Elder Brother (c. 1625; published 1637), Act III, scene 5.
  • Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. [...] The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due—she reminds us to much of a prima donna.
  • The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a greater temptation to the ego.
    • Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), "Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype".

G

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  • Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!
    • Original: Облетев Землю в корабле-спутнике, я увидел, как прекрасна наша планета. Люди, будем хранить и приумножать эту красоту, а не разрушать её!
    • Yuri Gagarin; Russian phrase, handwritten and signed after his historic spaceflight, photo of facsimile published in Syny goluboi planety 3rd. edition (1981) by L. Lebedev, A. Romanov, and B/ Luk'ianov; the first edition was translated into English as Sons of the Blue Planet (1973) by L. A. Lebedev.
  • There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That is precisely what makes its pursuit so interesting.
  • Il n'y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid.
    • There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly.
    • Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835; Paris: Charpentier, 1866).
  • Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
  • The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?
  • What happens when everyone in a society is finally beautiful (and healthy)? When the final aesthetic surgery is developed that will make all visages and bodies "perfect"? Will everyone in that society be happy? In examining the discourses of the late nineteenth century on this question, we are confronted with the paradox of François Xavier Bichat, as paraphrased by Charles Darwin: "If everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de’ Medici (de Milo), we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.” The very search for the improvement of the body (and the concomitant “happiness” of the psyche) must lead to further discontent.
  • Do not allow yourself to be thrashed by the provoking whip of a beautiful face. How can sense slaves enjoy the world? Its subtle flavours escape them while they grovel in primal mud. All nice discriminations are lost to the man of elemental lusts.
  • Good manners without sincerity are like a beautiful dead lady.
  • Beauty is not so much performance as promise.
  • Handsome is that handsome does.
  • Monstruosidad del ánimo es más deforme que la del cuerpo, porque desdice de la belleza superior.
    • Spiritual deformity is worse than bodily deformity, for it contradicts a superior beauty.
    • Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 168.
  • Beauty by no complexion is defin'd,
    Is of all colours, and to none confin'd.
    • George Granville, "The Progress of Beauty", line 50, in Poems upon Several Occasions (London: J. Tonson, 1712), p. 27.
  • 'Tis impious pleasure to delight in harm,
    And beauty shou'd be kind, as well as charm.
    • George Granville, "To Myra", line 21, in Poems upon Several Occasions (London: J. Tonson, 1712), p. 65.
  • The man of half-grown intelligence, when he observes an object which is bathed in the glow of a seeming beauty, thinks that that object is in its essence beautiful, no matter what it is that so prepossesses him with the pleasure of the eye. He will not go deeper into the subject. But the other, whose mind's eye is clear, and who can inspect such appearances, will neglect those elements which are the material only upon which the Form of Beauty works; to him they will be but the ladder by which he climbs to the prospect of that Intellectual Beauty, in accordance with their share in which all other beauties get their existence and their name.
  • The elegance of rich, complex, and diverse phenomena emerging from a simple set of universal laws is at least part of what physicists mean when they invoke the term "beautiful."
    • Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (1999) Ch. 7 The "Super" in Superstrings.
  • Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?
    • Queen in "Snow White", Grimms' Fairy Tales.

H

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  • There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist, except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.
  • There is certainly a religion which belongs to the physical form, and which should be regarded in degree as much as that which belongs to the soul. It is as much a duty for every man and woman to perfect fully their physical form as for them to continually search for immortality.
    • Cora Hatch, “The Religion of Life,” Discourses on Religion, Morals, Philosophy and Metaphysics (1858).
  • If you need something to worship, then worship life — all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!
  • Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.
    • David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, Literary (1748), Essay 23: "Of The Standard of Taste".
  • Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived. Or if we reason concerning it, and endeavor to fix its standard, we regard a new fact, to wit, the general tastes of mankind, or some such fact, which may be the object of reasoning and enquiry.
  • Where beauty is worshiped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
    • Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies (1927), "The Substitutes for Religion".

I

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  • ¿En perseguirme, mundo, qué interesas?
    ¿En qué te ofendo, cuando sólo intento
    poner bellezas en mi entendimiento
    y no mi entendimiento en las bellezas?
    • O World, why do you wish to persecute me?
      How do I offend you, when I intend
      only to fix beauty in my intellect,
      and never my intellect fix on beauty?
    • Juana Inés de la Cruz Sonnet 146, as translated by Edith Grossman in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works (2014)

J

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  • When you get to the point where you cheat for the sake of beauty, you're an artist.
  • Once a centenarian teacher who had the body of an adolescent told me he had studied martial arts. "Me, too," I answered. We were in Notre Dame, and he said, "Attack me." I put myself in a combat position, and he moved his left hand in such an incredibly beautiful way that while I looked at it, fascinated, he gave me a big slap. "Beauty is the most dangerous weapon," he warned. It took me a long time to understand. He used a secret Chinese practice, which consists of drawing a snake in the air with your hand to distract the enemy. And that is how beauty is: the most awful weapon.
  • πᾶν τὸ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ, ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν καὶ ἡ ἀλαζονία τοῦ βίου, οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ πατρός, ἀλλὰ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου ἐστίν.
  • Zuleika: "How beautiful are thine eyes, with which thou hast charmed all Egyptians, both men and women!"
    Joseph: "Beautiful as they may be while I am alive, so ghastly they will be to look upon in the grave!"
  • Eyes raised toward heaven are always beautiful, whatever they be.
    • Joseph Joubert, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 22.
  • The divine right of beauty is the only one an Englishman ought to acknowledge, and a pretty woman the only tyrant he is not authorized to resist.
    • Junius, letter (September 7, 1769), in Letters, Vol. II (London: Bell & Daldy, 1865), p. 275.

K

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  • We must remember: what is beautiful is the resistance, and that people can-and must-resist from their own authentic place in the world…It is from this solid, self-knowing place that we can work towards peace and justice
    • Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology (1986)
  • Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.
  • A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
    Its loveliness increases; it will never
    pass into nothingness.
  • Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
    • John Keats, Poems (1820), "Ode on a Grecian Urn", last lines.
  • I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?
    • Jean Kerr, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I Don't Want to Hear One Word Out Of You", The Snake Has All the Lines (1960).
  • Nieuwerkerke's replacement did not give Manet and the painters of the Café Guerbois any... cause for cheer. Under the Third Republic... in November 1870 Charles Blanc... became Director of Fine Arts. ...Blanc had published a biography of Ingres, whom he idealized... and for several decades [Blanc] had been the most prolific and articulate exponent of the sort of Neoclassicism celebrated at the École des Beaux-Arts. In his lofty conception of art, Eve was the original representative of beauty, but by plucking the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge she had plunged the world into a... sort of Platonic world of appearances in which the ideal was obscured by the humdrum and ugly material world. ...[T]he ability to see through the veil of appearances... was "obscure, latent, and sleeping" among the majority of men. However, great artists— ...especially Ingres and the painters of the Italian Renaissance—"carry within themselves this idea of the beautiful in a state of light." The true mission of art was... to show the "idea of the beautiful" that concealed itself behind the flickering shadows of the fallen world. ...[A]rt should not portray nature... but should idealize it... [H]e was vehemently opposed to Realism and paintings of la vie moderne, believing that artists who imitated nature and everyday life were slaves to appearance.
    • Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (2006) p. 315; citing Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867), Misook Song, The Arts Theories of Charles Blanc (1984), and Jennifer L. Shaw, "The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863," Art History 14 (December, 1991) pp. 549-53.
  • In this job an illusion of beauty is sold which doesn’t really exist like that. It’s like a work of art, an act. I cry in front of the camera but am not really sad. I’ve just come from a job, am made-up and made to look beautiful with fantastic clothes and hair and nails all done.
  • Half of all the women in the world are beautiful to men, nearly all are beautiful when they smile, and all are beautiful all the time to God.
    • Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 69.

L

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  • The first step towards establishing pretensions of any kind, is to believe firmly in them yourself: faith is very catching, and half the beauty-reputations of which I hear have originated with the possessors.
  • (Five-year-old Max, to his fatherː) "My teacher tells me real beauty's on the inside."
    (Father, in replyː) "That's just something ugly people say."
  • Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.
    • Sophia Loren Arneson, Krystin; Gustashaw, Megan (2011). "25 of the Best Fashion Quotes of All Time". Glamour. Retrieved January 22, 2013.

M

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  • Ghritachi and Menaka and Rambha and Purvachitti and Swayamprabha and Urvashi and Misrakeshi and Dandagauri and Varuthini and Gopali and Sahajanya and Kumbhayoni and Prajagara and Chitrasena and Chitralekha and Saha and Madhuraswana, these and others by thousands, possessed of eyes like lotus leaves, who were employed in enticing the hearts of persons practising rigid austerities, danced there. And possessing slim waists and fair large hips, they began to perform various evolutions, shaking their deep bosoms, and casting their glances around, and exhibiting other attractive attitudes capable of stealing the hearts and resolutions and minds of the spectators.
  • I remember that in a widely distributed French newspaper they asked the famous author of the Génie du Christianisme, if a nymph was not a bit more beautiful than a nun. In supposing them represented by the same talent or by equal talents (a condition without which the question would make no sense), there is no doubt that the nun would be more beautiful. The error best suited to extinguishing the true sentiment of beauty is that of confusing that which pleases with that which is beautiful, or in other words, that which pleases the senses with that which pleases the intelligence.
What spectator of our sex will not find himself more moved by Titian's Venus than by Raphael's most beautiful Virgin? And yet what a difference of merit and worth! The beautiful, in all imaginable genres, is that which pleases enlightened virtue. Any other definition is false or insufficient. So why would the nun be less beautiful than the nymph? Perhaps because she is clothed? By what immoral blindness would one want to judge the representation other than the reality? Who does not know that veiled beauty is more seductive than visible beauty? What man has not noticed, and ten thousand times, that the woman who decides to satisfy the eye more than the imagination lacks taste even more than wisdom?
  • Beauty … is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses.
    • Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, H. Lowe-Porter, trans. (1930), p. 45
  • A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child's ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary power to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing-love. It's smart to be strong. It's big to be generous. But it's sissified according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving affectionate, and alluring. "Aw, that;'s girls stuff!" snorts our young comics reader. "Who wants to be a girl?" And that's the point. Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.
  • Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.
  • Huey: Days like this, I look out at all the snow and think. Man, this is beautiful…
    Then I wonder – is it really beautiful, or have we just been conditioned to think of everything “white” as beautiful? Is my mind, perhaps, not as liberated from the slave mentality as I thought?
    Then I think, what if snow were brown? Would I find it as nice to look at, or would it look “dirty”? Is this indicative that somewhere within my subconscious lurks some heretofore undiscovered self-hate?
  • Through light and joy is the world opened up, revealed for what it is: ineffable beauty, unending creation.
    • Henry Miller, The Books In My Life (1952), Chapter 8: "The Days of My Life".
  • The moment one give close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself.
    • Henry Miller, Plexus (Book Two of The Rosy Crucifixion) (1953).
    • (often misquoted with "magnificent" for "magnified").
  • Beauty is Nature's coin, must not be hoarded,
    But must be current, and the good thereof
    Consists in mutual and partaken bliss.
  • Beauty is nature's brag, and must be shown
    In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities,
    Where most may wonder at the workmanship.
  • Hung over her enamour'd, and beheld
    Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep,
    Shot forth peculiar graces.
  • ...for beauty stands
    In the admiration only of weak minds
    Led captive. Cease to admire, and all her plumes
    Fall flat and shrink into a trivial toy,
    At every sudden slighting quite abash'd.
  • Yet beauty, tho' injurious, hath strange power,
    After offence returning, to regain
    Love once possess'd.
  • Amarás la belleza, que es la sombra de Dios sobre el Universo.
    • Translation: Love beauty, which is God's shadow across the universe.
    • Gabriela Mistral, "Decálogo del artista" ("Decalogue of the Artist"), Desolación (1922).
  • Beauty is as tangible as blood, in a way. It is a separate, distinct force that inhabits the bodies of men and women. You must have noticed the vacuity that accompanies perfect beauty in so many women...the force so strong that it drives out all other forces and lives vampirishly at the expense of intelligence and goodness and conscience and all else.
  • Beauty has wings, and too hastily flies,
    And love, unrewarded, soon sickens and dies.
  • Beauty is everlasting,
    and dust is for a time.
  • Beauty is perceived rhythm. Wave-rhythm through which everything outside us is mediated.
    Or: The beautiful is really everything one looks at with love. The more one loves the world, the more beautiful one will find it.
  • Since most people find mathematics somewhat forbidding, if not frightening, they find it difficult to understand how it can be regarded as beautiful. ...It is not the visual beauty of a painting or the audio beauty of a musical performance. Nor is it the literary beauty of a great poem; it is entirely intellectual and therefore, while more difficult to perceive, more satisfying when perceived.
    • Lloyd Motz & Jefferson Hane Weaver, Conquering Mathematics: From Arithmetic to Calculus (1991).

N

[edit]
  • Beauty is but a flower
    Which wrinkles will devour.
    • Thomas Nashe, Summer's Last Will and Testament (1600), lines 1588–1589.
  • Beauty is ever to the lonely mind
    A shadow fleeting; she is never plain.
    She is a visitor who leaves behind
    The gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
  • Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty—he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world—alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.

O

[edit]
  • Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
    • Robert Oppenheimer's last published words With Oppenheimer on an Autumn Day, Look, Volume 30, Number 26, December 19th, 1966
  • Aut formosa fores minus, aut minus improba, vellem.
    Non facit ad mores tam bona forma malos.
    • I would that you were either less beautiful, or less corrupt. Such perfect beauty does not suit such imperfect morals.
    • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), Book III, 11, 41.

P

[edit]
  • One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.
  • Let your beauty be not just the outward adorning of braiding the hair, and of wearing jewels of gold, or of putting on fine clothing; but in the hidden person of the heart, in the incorruptible adornment of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God very precious.
  • Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful—even one thing—then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine. That is the reconnection with the immortality of childhood, and the true beauty and majesty of the Being you can no longer see. You must be daring to try that.
  • The flowers anew returning seasons bring!
    But beauty faded has no second spring.
  • He had always suspected that beauty was the real feminine religion, from the willingness of its devotees to submit to martyrdom for it.
  • Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing!
    • Camille Pissarro Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)
  • The vicious lover is the follower of earthly Love who desires the body rather than the soul; his heart is set on what is mutable and must therefore be inconstant. And as soon as the body he loves begins to pass the first flower of its beauty, he "spreads his wings and flies away," giving the lie to all his pretty speeches and dishonoring his vows, whereas the lover whose heart is touched by moral beauties is constant all his life, for he has become one with what will never fade.
    • Plato, Pausanius in Symposium, 183e, M. Joyce, trans, Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961), p. 537.
  • But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life—thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine?
  • Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity—I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.
  • What we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to all; this common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony then which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can attain; and when I add that the universal harmony of the world is the source of all beauty, it will be understood what price we should attach to the slow and difficult progress which little by little enables us to know it better.
  • Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,
    And beauty draws us with a single hair.
  • Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
    Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

R

[edit]
  • Beauty is the purest feeling of the soul. Beauty arises when soul is satisfied.
    • Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power (2013)
  • the true / power of beauty: // not to attract but to repulse / those who would withhold / themselves from it
    • Paisley Rekdal, "Whistlejacket" (2024)
  • Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
  • Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.
  • Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
  • I do not understand where the 'beauty' and 'harmony' of nature are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans. I suppose what is meant by this 'beauty' and 'harmony' are such things as the beauty of the starry heavens. But one should remember that the stars every now and again explode and reduce everything in their neighborhood to a vague mist. Beauty, in any case, is subjective and exists only in the eye of the beholder.

S

[edit]
  • The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.
    • Yves Saint-Laurent. Gaille, Brandon (July 23, 2013). "List of 38 Famous Fashion Quotes and Sayings". BrandonGaille.com. Retrieved November 15, 2013.
  • Some say a host of cavalry, some an army on foot,
    and some a fleet of ships, is the most beautiful thing
    on this dark earth, but I say it is whatever
    one passionately desires.
    • Sappho (c. 600 B.C.). Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. Edgar Lobel and Denys Page. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, no. 16.
    • The verb translated as "passionately desires" is eratai, cognate with erōs.
  • Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen;
    Goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow.
    • Sappho (c. 600 B.C.). Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. Edgar Lobel and Denys Page. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, no. 148.
  • True beauty is in the mind; and the expression of the features depends more upon the moral nature than most people are aware of.
  • Das Unendliche endlich dargestellt ist Schönheit.
    • Beauty is the infinite represented in the finite.
    • Friedrich Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 1800).
  • Beauty comes, we know not how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself.
    • John Campbell Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868), "The Moral Dynamic", p. 434.
  • Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
    The eyes of men without orator.
  • Of Nature's gifts thou may'st with lilies boast
    And with the half-blown rose.
  • Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good;
    A shining gloss, that fadeth suddenly;
    A flower that dies, when first it 'gins to bud;
    A brittle glass, that's broken presently:
         A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
         Lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.
    • William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), st. 13 (numbering varies). There is some doubt about the authorship.
  • I'll not shed her blood;
    Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
    And smooth as monumental alabaster.
  • O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
    It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night,
    Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear:
    Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
  • 'Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white
    Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on.
  • There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple:
    If the ill spirit have so fair a house,
    Good things will strive to dwell with't.
  • Beauty is a magnet: repels some, attracts many, leaves no one unmoved.
  • To me the most beautiful thing is vulnerability.
    • Alec Soth Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)
  • Her face so faire, as flesh it seemed not,
    But heavenly pourtraict of bright angels' hew,
    Cleare as the skye withouten blame or blot,
    Through goodly mixture of complexion's dew.
  • The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.
    • Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891), Vol. 2, Chapter XIV, "Personal Beauty".
  • Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near; thus things regarded in themselves, and in relation to God, are neither ugly nor beautiful. Therefore, he who says that God has created the world, so that it might be beautiful, is bound to adopt one of the two alternatives, either that God created the world for the sake of men's pleasure and eyesight, or else that He created men's pleasure and eyesight for the sake of the world. ...Perfection and imperfection are names which do not differ much from the names beauty and ugliness. ...
    This I know, that between finite and infinite there is no comparison; so that the difference between God and the greatest and most excellent created thing is no less than the difference between God and the least created thing.
  • L'admiration pour le beau se rapporte toujours à la Divinité.
  • Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
  • Beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes the plainest.
    • Laurence Sterne, "Sermon XXIV: Pride" (1766), in The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (New York: J. F. Taylor & Company, 1904), Vol. II, p. 299.
  • Formonsa facies muta commendatio est.
    • A beautiful face is a silent commendation.
    • Publilius Syrus Sentences Maxim 283

T

[edit]
  • Forever
    Seek for Beauty, she only
    Fights with man against Death!
  • Do not beautify your appearance, but be beautiful in your way of life.
    • Thales of Miletus, in Early Greek Philosophy: Beginnings and Ionian Thinkers Loeb Classical Library Volume 525 (2016), p. 143
  • Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self.
  • The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves.
    • Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005)
  • It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
  • Bricks are considered to be the first material created by human intelligence from the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. ...The great variety of designs and effects that artists of the past, especially the Arabs... were able to create in their brickwork, assembled with an element so monotonous... can be compared only with the beauty and attractiveness a romantic poet attained by adjusting his verses to the rigidity of a formal meter.
    • Eduardo Torroja, Philosophy of Structures (1958) p. 28, Tr. J. J. Polivka, Milos Polivka from Razón y ser de los tipos estructurales (1957)
  • There is more or less of pathos in all true beauty. The delight it awakens has an undefinable and, as it were, luxurious sadness, which is perhaps one element of its might. It may be that this feeling springs from a sense of unattained good, of a perfection of being quite at variance with the present, which the beautiful never fails to suggest.
  • Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.
    • Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1899).

V

[edit]
  • All the beauty of the world, 'tis but skin deep.
    • Ralph Venning, Orthodoxe Paradoxes (Third Edition, 1650), The Triumph of Assurance, p. 41.
  • Gratior ac pulchro veniens in corpore virtus.
    • Even virtue is fairer when it appears in a beautiful person.
    • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), V. 344.
  • Nimium ne crede colori.
    • Trust not too much to beauty.
    • Virgil, Eclogæ (c. 42-38 BC), II. 17.
  • It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
    • Voltaire,"Dictionnaire philosophique portatif" (1764), "Taste", §1.
  • Ask a toad what is beauty....; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat head, a yellow belly and a brown back.

W

[edit]
  • O let me meet my days with quiet grace
    So all who gaze on me may truly say:
    "Lo, there is one who walked in Beauty's way!"
  • That beautiful flower in that vase has not spoken a word tonight; it will never speak a word, but, nevertheless, through its beauty and magnificent silence it is lifting up, and making more Christlike every human being in this room.
  • [S]ome scientists focus on ideal beauty, others on empirical truth. My own approach, following a great tradition going back to Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, has been to use beauty as a guide to truth.
    • Frank Wilczek, "Beautiful, Impractical Physics" (Oct. 29, 2020) The Wall Street Journal.
  • These experiences are not 'religious' in the ordinary sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally. They are not 'ineffable' in the sense the sense of incommunicable by language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far commoner than one might expect, that many people tend to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine, illogical, dangerous. 'One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in book keepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people'. The peak experience tends to be a kind of bubbling-over of delight, a moment of pure happiness. 'For instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The sun was streaming in, the children clean and nicely dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was casually playing with the children: but as she looked at them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty and her great love for them, and her feeling of good fortune, that she went into a peak experience . . .
  • [T]he man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.
    • D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), p. 113.
  • The gospel allies itself with all that is beautiful in the universe, as truly as with all that is noble and pure.
    • Samuel Wolcott, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 22.
  • Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Y

[edit]
  • What's female beauty, but an air divine,
    Through which the mind's all-gentle graces shine!
    They, like the Sun, irradiate all between;
    The body charms, because the soul is seen.

Z

[edit]
  • “Everything that’s miserable in the world,” Nick the dwarf once said to me, “is because of beauty.”
    “Not truth or goodness?” I’d asked.
    “Oh, they help. But beauty is the culprit, the real principle of evil.”
    “Not wealth?”
    “Money is beautiful.”

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

[edit]
Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 57-63.
  • I must not say that she was true,
    Yet let me say that she was fair;
    And they, that lovely face who view,
    They should not ask if truth be there.
  • Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair!
    For me her constant flame appears;
    The garland she hath culled, I wear
    On brows bald since my thirty years.
    Ye veils that deck my loved one rare,
    Fall, for the crowning triumph's nigh.
    Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair!
    And I, so plain a man am I!
  • The essence of all beauty, I call love,
    The attribute, the evidence, and end,
    The consummation to the inward sense
    Of beauty apprehended from without,
    I still call love.
  • And behold there was a very stately palace before him, the name of which was Beautiful.
  • Who doth not feel, until his failing sight
    Faints into dimness with its own delight,
    His changing cheek, his sinking heart confess,
    The might—the majesty of Loveliness?
    • Lord Byron, Bride of Abydos (1813), Canto I, Stanza 6.
  • The light of love, the purity of grace,
    The mind, the Music breathing from her face,
    The heart whose softness harmonized the whole,
    And, oh! the eye was in itself a Soul!
    • Lord Byron, Bride of Abydos (1813), Canto I, Stanza 6.
  • She walks in beauty like the night
    Of cloudless chimes and starry skies;
    And all that's best of dark and bright
    Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
    Thus mellowed to that tender light
    Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
  • Exceeding fair she was not; and yet fair
    In that she never studied to be fairer
    Than Nature made her; beauty cost her nothing,
    Her virtues were so rare.
  • I pour into the world the eternal streams
    Wan prophets tent beside, and dream their dreams.
  • She is not fair to outward view
    As many maidens be;
    Her loveliness I never knew
    Until she smiled on me:
    Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,
    A well of love, a spring of light.
  • Beauty is the lover's gift.
  • The ladies of St. James's!
    They're painted to the eyes;
    Their white it stays for ever,
    Their red it never dies;
    But Phyllida, my Phyllida!
    Her colour comes and goes;
    It trembles to a lily,—
    It wavers to a rose.
  • She, though in full-blown flower of glorious beauty,
    Grows cold, even in the summer of her age.
  • Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
    This charm is wasted on the marsh and sky,
    Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
    Then beauty is its own excuse for being.
  • The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
  • Who gave thee, O Beauty,
    The keys of this breast,—
    Too credulous lover
    Of blest and unblest?
    Say, when in lapsed ages
    Thee knew I of old?
    Or what was the service
    For which I was sold?
  • Each ornament about her seemly lies,
    By curious chance, or careless art composed.
  • Any color, so long as it's red,
    Is the color that suits me best,
    Though I will allow there is much to be said
    For yellow and green and the rest.
  • In beauty, faults conspicuous grow;
    The smallest speck is seen on snow.
    • John Gay, Fable, The Peacock, Turkey and Goose, line 1.
  • The dimple that thy chin contains has beauty in its round,
    That never has been fathomed yet by myriad thoughts profound.
  • There's beauty all around our paths, if but our watchful eyes
    Can trace it 'midst familiar things, and through their lowly guise.
  • Many a temptation comes to us in fine, gay colours that are but skin deep.
  • A heaven of charms divine Nausicaa lay.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book VI, line 22. Pope's translation.
  • O matre pulchra filia pulchrior.
    O daughter, more beautiful than thy lovely mother.
  • Nihil est ab omni
    Parte beatum.
    Nothing is beautiful from every point of view.
  • Sith Nature thus gave her the praise,
    To be the chiefest work she wrought,
    In faith, methink, some better ways
    On your behalf might well be sought,
    Than to compare, as ye have done,
    To match the candle with the sun.
  • Tell me, shepherds, have you seen
    My Flora pass this way?
    In shape and feature Beauty's queen,
    In pastoral array.
    • The Wreath, from The Lyre, Volume III, p. 27. (Ed. 1824). First lines also in a song by Dr. Samuel Howard.
  • A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen;
    She needs the royalty of beauty's mien.
  • Rara est adeo concordia formæ
    Atque pudicitiæ.
    Rare is the union of beauty and purity.
    • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), X. 297.
  • A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
    Its loveliness increases; it will never
    Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
    A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
    Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
  • L'air spirituel est dans les hommes ce que la régularité des traits est dans les femmes: c'est le genre de beauté où les plus vains puissent aspirer.
    A look of intelligence in men is what regularity of features is in women: it is a style of beauty to which the most vain may aspire.
  • 'Tis beauty calls, and glory shows the way.
    • Nathaniel Lee, Alexander the Great; or, The Rival Queens, Act IV, scene 2. ("Leads the way" in stage ed.).
  • Beautiful in form and feature,
    Lovely as the day,
    Can there be so fair a creature
    Formed of common clay?
  • Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
    Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
    And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
    That ope in the month of May.
  • Oh, could you view the melodie
    Of ev'ry grace,
    And musick of her face,
    You'd drop a teare,
    Seeing more harmonie
    In her bright eye,
    Then now you heare.
  • You are beautiful and faded
    Like an old opera tune
    Played upon a harpsichord.
  • Beauty and sadness always go together.
    Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth
    Upon the earth without a meet alloy.
  • O, thou art fairer than the evening air
    Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
  • 'Tis evanescence that endures;
    The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life.
    The rainbow is a momentary thing,
    The afterglows are ashes while we gaze.
  • The maid who modestly conceals
    Her beauties, while she hides, reveals:
    Gives but a glimpse, and fancy draws
    Whate'er the Grecian Venus was.
  • Not more the rose, the queen of flowers,
    Outblushes all the bloom of bower,
    Than she unrivall'd grace discloses;
    The sweetest rose, where all are roses.
  • To weave a garland for the rose,
    And think thus crown'd 'twould lovelier be,
    Were far less vain than to suppose
    That silks and gems add grace to thee.
    • Thomas Moore, Songs from the Greek Anthology, To Weave a Garland.
  • Die when you will, you need not wear
    At heaven's Court a form more fair
    Than Beauty here on Earth has given:
    Keep but the lovely looks we see
    The voice we hear, and you will be
    An angel ready-made for heaven.
    • Thomas Moore, Versification of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Life, p. 36.
  • An' fair was her sweet bodie,
    Yet fairer was her mind:—
    Menie's the queen among the flowers,
    The wale o' womankind.
  • Altho' your frailer part must yield to Fate,
    By every breach in that fair lodging made,
    Its blest inhabitant is more displayed.
  • And should you visit now the seats of bliss,
    You need not wear another form but this.
  • Hast thou left thy blue course in heaven, golden-haired son of the sky! The west has opened its gates; the bed of thy repose is there. The waves come, to behold thy beauty. They lift their trembling heads. They see thee lovely in thy sleep; they shrink away with fear. Rest, in thy shadowy cave, O sun! let thy return be in joy.
    • Ossian, Carric-Thura, Stanza 1.
  • And all the carnal beauty of my wife
    Is but skin-deep.
    • Sir Thomas Overbury, A Wife. "Beauty is but skin deep" is found in The Female Rebellion, written about 1682.
  • Auxilium non leve vultus habet.
    A pleasing countenance is no slight advantage.
    • Ovid, Epistolæ Ex Ponto, II, 8, 54.
  • Raram facit misturam cum sapientia forma.
    Beauty and wisdom are rarely conjoined.
  • O quanta species cerebrum non habet!
    O that such beauty should be so devoid of understanding!
  • Nimia est miseria nimis pulchrum esse hominem.
    It is a great plague to be too handsome a man.
    • Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, I, 1, 68.
  • When the candles are out all women are fair.
  • 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,
    But the joint force and full result of all.
  • No longer shall the bodice aptly lac'd
    From thy full bosom to thy slender waist,
    That air and harmony of shape express,
    Fine by degrees, and beautifully less.
  • For, when with beauty we can virtue join,
    We paint the semblance of a form divine.
  • Nimis in veritate, et similitudinis quam pulchritudinis amantior.
    Too exact, and studious of similitude rather than of beauty.
  • Fair are the flowers and the children, but their subtle suggestion is fairer;
    Rare is the roseburst of dawn, but the secret that clasps it is rarer;
    Sweet the exultance of song, but the strain that precedes it is sweeter
    And never was poem yet writ, but the meaning outmastered the meter.
  • Is she not more than painting can express,
    Or youthful poets fancy, when they love?
  • Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.
  • The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin deep saying.
  • The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.
  • All things of beauty are not theirs alone
    Who hold the fee; but unto him no less
    Who can enjoy, than unto them who own,
    Are sweetest uses given to possess.
  • Damals war nichts heilig, als das Schöne.
    In days of yore [in ancient Greece] nothing was sacred but the beautiful.
  • Die Wahrheit ist vorhanden für den Weisen.
    Die Schönheit für ein fühlend Herz.
    Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.
  • Das ist das Loos des Schönen auf der Erde!
    That is the lot of the beautiful on earth.
  • And ne'er did Grecian chisel trace
    A Nymph, a Naiad, or a Grace,
    Of finer form, or lovelier face!
  • There was a soft and pensive grace,
    A cast of thought upon her face,
    That suited well the forehead high,
    The eyelash dark, and downcast eve.
  • Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses,
    Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea,
    Alone can flush the exalted consciousness
    With shafts of sensible divinity—
    Light of the world, essential loveliness.
  • Why thus longing, thus forever sighing
    For the far-off, unattain'd, and dim,
    While the beautiful all round thee lying
    Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?
  • O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
    By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
  • A lovely lady, garmented in light
    From her own beauty.
  • She died in beauty—like a rose blown from its parent stem.
    • Charles Doyne Sillery, She Died in Beauty.
  • O beloved Pan, and all ye other gods of this place, grant me to become beautiful in the inner man.
  • For all that faire is, is by nature good;
    That is a signe to know the gentle blood.
  • They seemed to whisper: "How handsome she is!
    What wavy tresses! what sweet perfume!
    Under her mantle she hides her wings;
    Her flower of a bonnet is just in bloom."
  • She wears a rose in her hair,
    At the twilight's dreamy close:
    Her face is fair,—how fair
    Under the rose!
  • Fortuna facies muta commendatio est.
    A pleasing countenance is a silent commendation.
  • A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
    And most divinely fair.
  • How should I gauge what beauty is her dole,
    Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,
    As birds see not the casement for the sky?
    And as 'tis check they prove its presence by,
    I know not of her body till I find
    My flight debarred the heaven of her mind.
  • Whose body other ladies well might bear
    As soul,—yea, which it profanation were
    For all but you to take as fleshy woof,
    Being spirit truest proof.
  • Whose form is as a grove
    Hushed with the cooing of an unseen dove.
  • And as pale sickness does invade
    Your frailer part, the breaches made
    In that fair lodging still more clear
    Make the bright guest, your soul, appear.
  • The yielding marble of her snowy breast.
  • Elysian beauty, melancholy grace,
    Brought from a pensive, though a happy place.
  • Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair,
    Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair,
    But all things else about her drawn
    From May-time and the cheerful Dawn.
  • Alas! how little can a moment show
    Of an eye where feeling plays
    In ten thousand dewy rays;
    A face o'er which a thousand shadows go!
  • And beauty born of murmuring sound.
  • True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
    Whose veil is unremoved
    Till heart with heart in concord beats,
    And the lover is beloved.

See also

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